Very good news from Big Lottery Fund’s small grants scheme, Awards for All which gives grants from £300 – £10,000. From 1 June, they are running a six month pilot where they will now fund repeat or ongoing activities.
This means that if you’ve been running a pensioners group for several years, you can apply to them to fund it for a year. If you run summer playschemes, you can ask them to fund the next one. It doesn’t matter whether they or someone else has funded the activities before.
The pilot applies only to groups with a turnover below £30,000. All other conditions remain the same, so if you’ve had £10,000 from them recently you can’t apply again within a year. Guidance notes and application form are on their website.
An important point – the forms and guidance won’t change, so where the form asks on page 3 whether you are asking for repeat/ongoing activities, it’s fine to say ‘yes’, despite the form saying you must put ‘no’ to get funded. You will still need to make a good enough case on the rest of the form that your activity is needed, and that it helps people.
They hope this will encourage bids from small groups doing really important successful work, as they won’t have to try and make the activity look ‘new’ each time they write a bid. This has been a common complaint from many groups, and it’s really good that the Lottery have taken this on board. Awards for All is a good scheme, funding a wide range of activities with a very good success rate – over half the bids are funded. This change makes it even better.
Contacts:
Big Lottery Fund
Advice Line: 0845 4 10 20 30
Website: http://www.awardsforall.org.uk/england/index.html
